Monday, January 31, 2011

On many occasions, we've been tempted to grow our own potatoes. They're fairly low maintenance, can be grown in a pot or in the ground, last a fairly long time if stored properly, and can be very nutritious (high in potassium and vitamin C). Here's more incentive: according to this article, you can grow 100 pounds of potatoes in 4 sq. feet. Learn how after the jump...

clipped from: www.counterpunch.org the origins of the global rebellion against neoliberalismSeattle 1998London's J18 protests earlier the same yearpublic emergence of the Zapatista movement on January 1st 1994Caracazodescribed by Fernando Coronil as "the largest and most violently repressed revolt against austerity measures in Latin American history."Carlos Andrés Pérez"bait-and-switch" reformanti-neoliberal campaignIMF as a "bomb that only kills people."Pérez proceeded to implement the recently-formulated Washington Consensus to the letterabout-facePérez's neoliberal economic "packet" (the "paquetazo"two weeks after the inauguralsigned with the IMF on February 28thbasic premises of the Pérez plan were laid out as follows:a potent cocktail of stagnating incomes in the face of skyrocketing prices and monetary devaluation. As might be expected, poverty reached a peak in 1989February 27th 1989 was a Mondayfirst stageimmediate 100% increase ingasolineProtests kicked offearly commutefares had doubledmorning of February 28th

clipped from: www.counterpunch.org At 6pm, Pérezannounce the fateful decision to suspend constitutional guarantees and establish a state of siegeRepression was worst in Caracas' largest barrios: Catia in the west and Petare in the eastneighborhood of 23 de Enerothe organizational brain of the rebellionFormer Chavista vice president José Vicente Rangel put it clearly: "Venezuelan history split into twoA clandestine revolutionary movement had formed within the armed forces years earlier, led by Hugo Chávez, Jesús Urdaneta, Raúl Isaías Baduel, and the late Felipe Antonio Acosta. 1982 to be preciseCaracazo caught them off-guard.Young soldiers, largely drawn from the lower classes, were sent into the barrios to slaughter their own, and many refused to do fireanniversary of the Caracazo was celebratedin El Valle, one of the large barrios in CaracasAs Luis Britto García, radical poet and political writer (recently named to the presidential committee for constitutional reform) has long argued: "World War IV began in Venezuela. WWIII was the Cold War, which culminated in the fall of the Soviet Union and the apparent triumph of neoliberalism. World War IV began in Venezuela on February 27th 1989, with the first rebellion by an entire nation against a neoliberal package. As a result, we have discovered that a global extension of neoliberalism into the economic, social, political and cultural fields is impossible."

As the opening volley in the war against neoliberalism, the legacy of the Caracazo lives on as long as that struggle continues.

Expel all officials of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and their subset of lending institutions.

Arab countries which are currently under the yoke of IMF conditionalities (notably Egypt and Jordan among the Arabs, and Pakistan among the Moslem states) must unilaterally and immediately throw them off and reassert their national sovereignty.

Every Arab state should unilaterally and immediately declare a debt moratorium in the form of an open-ended freeze on all payments of interest and principal of international financial debt in the Argentine manner, starting with sums allegedly owed to the IMF-World Bank.

The assets of foreign multinational monopolistic firms, especially oil companies, should be seized as the situation requires.

Basic food staples and fuels should be subjected to price controls, with draconian penalties for speculation, including by way of derivatives.

Dirigist measures such as protective tariffs and food price subsidies can be quickly introduced.

Food production needs to be promoted by production and import bounties, as well as by international barter deals.

National grain stockpiles must be quickly constituted.

Capital controls and exchange controls are likely to be needed to prevent speculative attacks on national currencies by foreign hedge funds acting with the ulterior political motives of overthrowing national governments.

Most important, central banks must be nationalized and reconverted to a policy of 0% credit for domestic infrastructure, agriculture, housing, and physical commodity production, with special measures to enhance exports.

Once these reforms have been implemented, it may be time to consider the economic integration of the Arab world as an economic development community in which the foreign exchange earnings of the oil-producing states can be put to work on the basis of mutual advantage for infrastructure and hard commodity capital investment across the entire Arab world.

The alternative is an endless series of destabilizations masterminded by foreigners, and, quite possibly, terminal chaos.

clipped from: theeconomiccollapseblog.com #1 We Must Shut Down The Federal Reserve#2 We Must End Trade With All Nations That Allow Their Citizens To Be Paid Slave Labor Wages Or That Do Not Respect Basic Human Rights#3 We Must Radically Reduce The Size Of The Federal Government#4 We Must Provide Temporary Jobs For The American People During The Economic Transition#5 We Must Ban All Short Selling#6 We Must Ban Virtually All Derivatives#7 We Must Break Up The Big Wall Street Banks#8 We Must Initiate A Massive Law Enforcement Crackdown On Our Financial Markets#9 We Must Order U.S. Oil Companies To Use Untapped Oil Reserves In The United States And We Must Aggressively Develop Alternative Energy Sources#10 We Must Stop Paying Farmers Not To Grow Food#11 We Must Secure The U.S. border With Mexico#12 We Must Shut Down The IRS#13 We Must Slash Red Tape And The Miles Of Ridiculous Regulations#14 We Must Conduct A Massive Law Enforcement Crackdown On The Health Care Industry#15 We Must Stop Trying To Police The World #16 We Must Pull Out Of The United Nations And We Must Dramatically Reduce Foreign Aid#17 We Must End All Of The Ridiculous Police State Measures Which Are Chasing Tourists Away From Our Soil#18 We Must Seize The Assets Of The Ultra-Wealthy Individuals And International Banks That Have Been Committing Fraud Against The U.S. Government For Decades

Saturday, January 29, 2011

The Yemeni President, Ali Abullah Saleh, who is facing unprecedented and growing demonstrations calling for his resignation, has asked the Emir of Qatar to curb the broadcasts of Al Jazeera. Saleh said the channel's approach "serves the goals of Zionism, and terrorist groups from al Qaeda and the enemies of the Arab nation in general, and who have been trying to tear apart the nation and create fissures in its ranks to rob their resources and threaten the existence of future generations".

For the last three years, the US government secretly provided aid to the leaders behind this week's social uprising in Egypt aimed to topple the government of President Hosni Mubarak, according to a leaked diplomatic cable

Journalist: M. Ben M'Hidi, don't you think it's a bit cowardly to use women's baskets and handbags to carry explosive devices that kill so many innocent people?

Ben M'Hidi: And doesn't it seem to you even more cowardly to drop napalm bombs on defenseless villages, so that there are a thousand times more innocent victims? Of course, if we had your airplanes it would be a lot easier for us. Give us your bombers, and you can have our baskets.

A former Princeton international law professor has been condemned by the UN Secretary General and the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations for alluding to “an apparent cover-up” of the events of September 11th, 2001.

On January 11, 2011, UN Special Envoy to Palestine Richard Falk posted on his personal blog an article entitled “Interrogating the Arizona Killings from a Safe Distance.”[1]

Dr. Falk made a tangential point in his blog-post that governments too often abuse their authority by treating “awkward knowledge as a matter of state secrets”.

The 9/11 commissioners themselves, in a 2008 op-ed piece to the New York Times, bemoaned the withholding of witness evidence to the 9/11 Commission by the CIA: “What we do know is that government officials decided not to inform a lawfully constituted body, created by Congress and the president, to investigate one the greatest tragedies to confront this country. We call that obstruction.” [9]

Perhaps this sparrow is worth a cannon or two.

In other words, was Falk attacked so strongly to try to make people fear suggesting in public even the possibility that the official story is problematic?

By John Hoeflehttp://educate-yourself.org/cn/southernstrategyassaultonamerica01jan01.shtmlJanuary 1, 2001

Original title: Southern Strategy: Assault on the American Republic published in EIR January 2001

The political success of Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter's "Southern Strategy,'' transforming the White House and Congress into bastions of white Southern power, would have been impossible, without the economic transformation of the United States from the greatest industrial and scientific nation-state in history, to a post-industrial nation of white-collar accountants, real estate brokers, computer programmers, retail clerks, and hamburger-flippers.

This transformation of America, over the past 30-plus years, has been characterized by the collapse of the urban industrial and cultural centers of the North--New York, Detroit, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, etc.--and the gradual emergence of the "New South'' as the heartland of America's post-industrial economy.

Today, Southern cities like Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, and even Charlotte, North Carolina dominate the new economy'' and house the multinational corporate and banking headquarters that preside over the deregulated looting of every last remaining income stream.

[We are about to see just how masterful the masters of the strategy of tension are in their meddling and attempting to turn societies against themselves in order to shape the fiery end-product. I am certain that their egos exceed their mastery of human nature, at least any of the higher aspects of that nature. They will continue playing around, manipulating hot-headed emotions until the whole thing takes on a life of its own.]

Engdahl in the link above mentions Freedom House being one of the puppeteers orchestrating the unrest spreading across muslim nations - this is the same blueprint how the color revolutions were done in the ex-Soviet territory, the former Yugoslavia - same chefs and same recipes used - all the NGOs who are humanitarian fronts for US intel have trained propagandists on the ground leading these efforts are there once again.

Former CIA director neocon James Woolsey was the chairman of Freedom House and trustees include Zbig Brzezinski, former Clinton Commerce Secretary Stuart Eizenstat, and Susan Rice's old partner in crime, NSA adviser Anthony Lake. F

Freedom House lists USAID, US Information Agency, Soros Foundations and the National Endowment for Democracy, among its financial backers.

The serfs in a number of muslim nations are being fooled and directed to tear up their countries so that the NWO may take over and install its puppets, I believe. Look for CIA and Mossad holding some puppet strings.

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Egyptian police have been fighting protesters in intensifying clashes, and demonstrations have reported from Yemen and Gabon – a sign that defiance against authoritarian rulers in the Middle East is spreading.

We are about to see just how masterful the masters of the "strategy of tension" are in their meddling and attempting to turn societies against themselves in order to shape the fiery end-product. The whole thing may very well take on a life of its own

The corporatists and fascists who have steered Europe into bankruptcy are now using their media assets to morph their favorite threat over the last two decades -- Islamist terrorism -- to a combined menace of Islamist terrorists teamed up with an international network of anarchists. The change of threat was necessary with corporatists and fascist-led governments in Europe besieged by workers and students who are militantly opposed to severe cuts in social spending that were dictated from supranational institutions in order to financially bail out greedy bankers and their lackeys in governments.

In Greece and Italy, where governments are under street pressure to resign over corruption and austerity moves, there are already signs that the paradigm shift from Islamist terrorism to leftist anarchism is already occurring, with highly-suspicious and likely false flag bombings taking place at embassies and other facilities.

Europe has seen such false flag terrorist attacks in the past blamed on leftist revolutionary groups like the Italian Red Brigades and the West German Red Army Faction, but actually carried out by a network of CIA and fascist operatives, supported by local police and intelligence agencies, to blame leftists for such attacks. The operation, known generally as “Gladio,” was a ploy to damage the reputation of the Communist parties of Western Europe in order that they were not invited to join in any leftist government coalitions, particularly in Italy and France.

UN Human Rights Official Under Fire For Describing 9/11 As A Cover Up 100408Sept11 An official working within the recently established UN Human Rights Council is under fire from an NGO closely affiliated with Israel for suggesting that the official explanation of the 9/11 attacks is a cover up.

Richard Falk, a former professor of international law emeritus at Princeton University, and an expert on human rights made the comments in a blog post last week, noting that the mainstream media is “unwilling to acknowledge the well-evidenced doubts about the official version of the events: an al Qaeda operation with no foreknowledge by government officials.”

Falk described this version of the 9/11 story as an “apparent cover up” containing “gaps and contradictions”.

Ali Abunimah think the Palestinian Papers are "dynamite". what does this do to the theory that Wiki-leaks is some kind of National Security State "limited hang-out" with Cass Sunstein coordinating on some level?

had in 2008 co-authored an article containing a plan for the government to prevent the spread of anti-government “conspiracy theories.” Arguing that such theories are believed only by groups suffering from “informational isolation,” he advocated the use of anonymous government agents to engage in “cognitive infiltration” of these groups in order to introduce “cognitive diversity,” with the aim of breaking them up.

being similar to the FBI’s COINTELPRO of the 1960s, would be illegal–David Ray Griffin focuses on the fact that Sunstein’s primary target is the conspiracy theory advocated by the 9/11 Truth Movement. Examining Sunstein’s charge that this theory is both “harmful” and “demonstrably false,” Griffin uses both satire and overwhelming evidence to show that this twofold charge applies instead to what Sunstein calls “the true conspiracy theory” about 9/11-namely, the “theory that Al-Qaeda was responsible for 9/11.”

Who is it who relentlessly spread "false conspiracy theories" of Saddam-engineered anthrax attacks and Iraq-created mushroom clouds and a Ba'athist/Al-Qaeda alliance -- the most destructive conspiracy theories of the last generation? And who is it who demonized as "conspiracy-mongers" people who warned that the U.S. Government was illegally spying on its citizens, systematically torturing people, attempting to establish permanent bases in the Middle East, or engineering massive bailout plans to transfer extreme wealth to the industries which own the Government? The most chronic and dangerous purveyors of "conspiracy theory" games are the very people Sunstein thinks should be empowered to control our political debates through deceit and government resources: namely, the Government itself

It is this history of government deceit and wrongdoing that renders Sunstein's desire to use covert propaganda to "undermine" anti-government speech so repugnant. The reason conspiracy theories resonate so much is precisely that people have learned -- rationally -- to distrust government actions and statements. Sunstein's proposed covert propaganda scheme is a perfect illustration of why that is. In other words, people don't trust the Government and "conspiracy theories" are so pervasive precisely because government is typically filled with people like Cass Sunstein, who think that systematic deceit and government-sponsored manipulation are justified by their own Goodness and Superior Wisdom.

UPDATE III: Just to get a sense for what an extremist Cass Sunstein is (which itself is ironic, given that his paper calls for "cognitive infiltration of extremist groups," as the Abstract puts it), marvel at this paragraph:

So Sunstein isn't calling right now for proposals (1) and (2) -- having Government "ban conspiracy theorizing" or "impose some kind of tax on those who" do it -- but he says "each will have a place under imaginable conditions." I'd love to know the "conditions" under which the government-enforced banning of conspiracy theories or the imposition of taxes on those who advocate them will "have a place." That would require, at a bare minumum, a repeal of the First Amendment. Anyone who believes this should, for that reason alone, be barred from any meaningful government position.

In this corner, a libertarian, tea party hero who ran several campaigns as a candidate for US president on the Republican ticket. And in that corner, a progressive icon of the left who also ran several campaigns for the US presidency but on the Green Party ticket.

One might think the two men, seemingly ideologically opposed to one another, would rather argue than help one another.

However, on Wednesday's broadcast of Freedom Watch on the Fox Business channel, Judge Napolitano sat down for an amiable interview with Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) and Ralph Nader to discuss a progressive-libertarian alliance in the 112th session of respective chambers in Congress.

Sunday, January 09, 2011

Well we're movin on up,To the east side.To a deluxe apartment in the sky.Movin on up,To the east side.We finally got a piece of the pie.

Fish don't fry in the kitchen;Beans don't burn on the grill.Took a whole lotta tryin',Just to get up that hill.Now we're up in the big leagues,Gettin' our turn at bat.As long as we live, it's you and me baby,There ain't nothin wrong with that.

Well we're movin on up,To the east side.To a deluxe apartment in the sky.Movin on up,To the east side.We finally got a piece of the pie.

Tuesday, January 04, 2011

The video's mostly in Spanish, but the key part, where Carmona illegally swears himself in as president and Romero demolishes all semblance of Venezuelan democracy, is helpfully subtitled in English.

It's fitting that he should be a pallbearer at CAP's mafiosic funeral, since CAP himself called more than once for Hugo Chávez to be executed "like a dog". And since CAP himself also ordered a massacre of his own people--which led directly to Chavecito's military uprising against him three years after the Caracazo. One dearly departed democrat indeed!

An anti-lynching, anti-racist song, the first big hit of its kind, and considered the most influential song of the 20th century. "I wrote 'Strange Fruit'," said Meeropol, "because I hate lynching, and I hate injustice, and I hate the people who perpetuate it." Abel Meeropol was, like the Rosenbergs, a communist, a strong advocate of civil rights, and an anti-fascist. He undoubtedly taught his adopted sons to stand up for what was right, and they do so to this day--denouncing the same senseless hypocrisy that resulted in the deaths of their parents.

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About Me

I am the son of a Huichol medicine man, a Valiente, and a Zapatista. I channel Simón Bolívar when Hugo Chavez isn't in town. In a prior lifetime, I rode with Pancho Villa in the foothills of the Sierra Madre and the Chihuahuan Desert and while I will always admire him, in the end he was a disappointment